Tuesday, May 12, 2015

New Ways to Store Big Data on Azure from Microsoft

Azure is going to have a new data warehouse service. It's called a "data lake" service that is going to store a huge amount of data and give the option of running an "elastic" database that can store sets of data that vary in size. Scot Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President of the cloud and enterprise group, unveiled these new services at the companies Build 2015 conference in San Francisco.

The Azure SQL Date Warehouse is going to be up and running later this year and is going to give companies a way to store petabytes of data. This will allow the data to be easily consumed by data analyzing software like Microsoft's Power BI tool for data visualization, the Azure Data Factory for data orchestration, or the Azure Machine Learning service.

One thing that makes this data storage service different than the rest is that it has the ability to adjust to fit the amount of data that actually needs to be stored. You can also specify exactly how much processing power you need to be able to analyze the data. The service builds on the parallel processing architecture that Microsoft developed for its SQL Server database.

This new cloud service is made for companies and organizations that need to store massive amounts of data so that it can be analyzed by different analysis platforms like Hadoop. It could also be super useful for Internet of Things systems that might create huge amounts of data. The amount of data you"ll be able to store is absolutely endless. So you can see how this would be helpful. There is literally no limit.

The company also updated the Azure SQL database service so that customers can pool their Azure database and reduce their storage cost and prepare for new activity. This means that you can manage your storage at a lower cost.

All of this is going to be very useful for running public-facing software services where the amount of space used can fluctuate a whole lot day to day. With most services like this, you'll generally pay for your peak storage space no matter how much of it you are using at the time. This means that you can cut your costs, probably in half, and literally only pay for exactly how much you are using at any given time.